Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (22 page)

“Aren’t you?”

“I haven’t seen it, but others seem to
believe it.” Then he winced. That “seem to” would have gotten Denne
to jump all over him.

MariCate didn’t seem to notice. Instead she
offered what seemed like a nonsequiter. “My grandfather helped
build this place.”

And suddenly Retsler understood why Stanley
had sent him up here. Not to see musty old books, but to talk to
MariCate who, like most people in an area routinely flooded by
tourists, wouldn’t answer direct questions, but might talk to
someone she trusted.

“You know they got snowed in,” she said.

“Stanley told me they snowshoed out.”

“They did, but not to escape or get supplies.
That’s the cover story.”

“What’s the real story?” Retsler asked.

She smiled. “It was a rescue.”

He didn’t follow. “Leaving was a rescue?”

“No, no,” she said. “Stanley must’ve also
told you no one died building this place.”

“Yes, he did,” Retsler said.

“Which is true. You, as a policeman, probably
know that truth hides in the words you choose.”

Somewhere in this conversation, he had
stopped leaning. He placed his hands on the polished wood
countertop.

“People did die then,” he said after a
moment. “Just not building the place. They died during the
blizzard…?”

“No,” she said. “They died in the Caves.
Where they went for shelter. Most of a family died. The cook, his
wife, and his adult son.”

“Most?” Retsler’s palms felt damp. He removed
them from the wood, saw the prints he left, then shoved his hands
in his pockets.

“The twelve-year-old daughter, she got out.
They rescued her and four other children.”

“What were children doing up here?” Retsler
asked. “I thought this was a WPA project.”

“It was,” MariCate said, “but a lot of
families, you know, were homeless then. And when the man got work,
sometimes the whole family came along. They weren’t supposed to,
but they camped nearby, on Cave Creek, and probably got sheltered
in the buildings the men made for themselves.”

“Probably?” Retsler asked. “You don’t
know?”

“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she said. “My
grandfather didn’t like talking about this. He was 81 when I
divorced and moved up here. He tried to talk me out of it. He
didn’t want me on this side of the mountain.”

“The shadow side,” Retsler said.

“You didn’t notice, did you, when you drove
in that this is a kind of high valley? Marble Village is actually
in a box valley, at 4,000 feet, mind you, but a box valley just the
same. Only one real way in. At least there’s light there.”

“And not here? I seem to see quite a bit of
sunlight around this place.”

“Around parts of it. But there’s never
sunlight from the kitchen to the Caves. You didn’t notice that, did
you?”

He hadn’t noticed it. He would check out what
she said later. “Why didn’t your grandfather want you here?”

“He said it was dangerous. He especially
warned me out of those Caves. The access here isn’t used at all by
the Park Service. It’s mapped, but it’s blocked inside and out,
except for a tributary of the River Styx that they couldn’t block
without hurting the rest of the Caves.”

“Why is it blocked?”

“Oh,” she said with that smile. It was
impish, and he rather liked it. So far today, he’d found two women
his age attractive. Maybe he had been alone too long. “They’ll
never say why. They’ll say it’s too dangerous for tourists, which
is true, and they’ll tell you that there’s nothing to see, which
isn’t, and then they’ll tell you that it hasn’t been mapped, which
is an out-and-out lie.”

“They won’t tell me,” Retsler said, “but you
will.”

Her smile widened into a grin. “As my
grandfather spins in his grave, certainly. The reason is that
people die in this part of the Caves, and not normal dying either.
They freeze to death, sometimes in a matter of minutes and
sometimes over days.”

“I thought the Caves were forty-one degrees,”
Retsler said.

“They are,” she said.

“The people just get chilled then,” he
said.

“If exposure can turn you into a block of
ice, then yeah, they just get chilled,” she said.

“Block of ice.” He wasn’t even trending
toward sarcasm now, not with that icy footprint. “So you think the
child is an ice-ghost? One of the children that died in there while
this hotel was being built?”

“Children didn’t die in there,” she said.
“That’s what I was telling you. One got out—a girl. She came back
to the men huddled in their cabins during the storm. How she found
them, well, that’s subject to conjecture, because you know how hard
it is to find anything in white-out conditions.”

He hadn’t known that until his sojourn in
Montana. The scariest day he’d had as chief there had been during a
severe and sudden snowstorm, one that had stranded him beside the
highway. Fortunately, he’d pulled off, or his jeep would’ve been
totaled by the idiots trying to drive blind.

He nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“Well, she told them that the cook’s family
was in there, and a few of the kids, who’d been playing near the
River Styx, and asked them to get the family out. The men waited
until the snow had eased, thinking the family would be safer in the
Caves. By the time they got there, there was a snow barrier, or so
it seemed, covering the entrance. Avalanche, they thought, or
something. Anyway, as they tried to dig out, they kept hitting
rock. They were using their hands and some shovels that broke. They
needed more equipment.”

“What kind of equipment?” Retsler asked.
“They couldn’t use dynamite and there wasn’t anything that would
have made it up the mountain in a storm, no grader or
anything.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I never asked. My
grandfather and his friends snowshoed down with the girl, got help,
came back up with supplies. A handful of guys remained. They
managed to make a small opening, found the frozen adults, but the
children were still missing. So they did a search.”

“The adults froze near the entrance then,”
Retsler said. Of course. That made sense. Nothing supernatural at
all. He felt a thread of relief.

“No,” she said. “They were nearly a mile into
the cave, in a room appropriately called ‘The Ice Palace.’ My
grandfather said after this whole thing, there was talk of digging
out that room to see if the stalagmites were actually people,
frozen in place, but that idea got scrapped. It haunted my
grandfather, though, I tell you.”

It couldn’t be that easy. It never was. Not
here, not in Oregon. Retsler sighed. “And the children?”

“They left on their own, while the men were
trying to get the bodies out of the Ice Palace. The kids said they
were playing with their friends, and hadn’t even known there was a
storm, had no idea they’d been there for days, weren’t even hungry,
and certainly didn’t look like they’d been trapped in a cave.”

“Denial,” Retsler said.

She gave him an appraising look, then
shrugged. “They didn’t use that word back then, but a lot thought
it might be something like that.”

“Your grandfather didn’t.”

“He finished the winter here, and never came
back. He kept moving south, away from snow or snow-capped mountain
peaks. Died in Los Angeles, in a house where he couldn’t see any
mountains at all.” She was clearly waiting for Retsler to ask a
question, and this time, he knew what the question was.

“Why was he afraid of snow?”

“Said there were things in it. He could see
them. Creatures. Said Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen wasn’t a
story after all.”

“I never read it,” Retsler said.

“Think of a winter queen. She had an army
made of snowflakes, and commanded the ice. She could steal a man’s
soul with a single kiss.”

“Sounds like a fable to me,” Retsler said.
“And there are no mountains in Denmark, so Andersen wouldn’t have
been writing about the Shadow Side.”

“He was writing about snow, and ice, and what
some call ice fairies.”

“Is that what you think this is?” Retsler
added.

“I think the word ‘fairy’ gets used for all
kinds of magical beasts,” she said. “But the children lost time,
like people do in fairy kingdoms. Washington Irving wrote about
that in ‘Rip Van Winkle.’”

“Which was a metaphor for the changes that
occurred during the Revolutionary War,” Retsler said.

Her expression cooled. “I didn’t expect a
skeptic. They said you knew about these things.”

He sighed. “Not snow creatures.”

Although snow was water. Frozen water. Ice
crystals.

“You said the children were playing with
their friends,” he said, hoping to get back on track.

She nodded. “That’s why my grandfather never
let me up here. The children had always talked about their
imaginary friends in the Caves. After the incident, he decided
those friends were real. He says he saw them.”

“Children,” Retsler said.

“Yes,” she said. “He said they loved coming
into the camp kitchen to get warm.”

***

Retsler didn’t know if he believed any of it.
He didn’t know if he disbelieved any of it either. He poked a bit
more, discovered that others had died in the Caves, but that the
deaths were ruled exposure, which could happen to anyone in
prolonged forty-one degree temperatures.

Plus, he never trusted death analysis from
the previous century—at least, not before 1950 or so, when the
practice of forensic medicine, like the practice of medicine
itself, became more science-based and less reliant on the skill of
the practitioner.

By the account that MariCate had given, these
men had pulled bodies out of that cave that were “frozen to death,”
but that phrase got used for everything from exposure to being too
cold to actually freezing in a snow bank.

Retsler could imagine what Denne would say.
Retsler was using supposition just like everyone else was. Only
Retsler’s reinforced his own bent to the practical, to the real
world, not a willingness to believe in fairies and poltergeists and
things that go bump in the night.

Even though he had seen those things, more
than once.

He took the proffered hotel room, which was
beautiful. It had clearly been redesigned in recent years, with a
modern bathroom added, and the most comfortable mattress he’d ever
encountered. The hotel had internet access and more television
channels than he had in Montana. Even so, the place still felt
rustic. Maybe it was the rough hewn walls, or the ancient bed
frame. Maybe it was the photographs on the walls, black-and-whites
of former guides and mountain men and the men who built this
place.

Or maybe it was the remoteness. Even with all
the connectivity, he still felt far away from civilization. If he
closed his eyes, he could imagine himself back an entire century,
learning about the real-world magic of the Oregon mountains, the
pines, the caves, the breath-taking views.

To Retsler, that kind of beauty had fairy
dust sprinkled all over it, and not the kind that made a man lose
ten years, but the kind that made him realize there was no other
place on Earth like this one.

At a very good dinner in the fancy dining
room, the town parents regaled him with stories about Marble
Village, true-to-life stories about the town drunk and the
occasional domestic and the one real murder the town had had in the
past five years.

He’d had a conversation just like this one in
Montana before his hire there, and back then, it had sounded like
heaven to him. Dealing with everyday problems, with families and
bar fights and the occasional true crime.

But this time, he couldn’t make himself
focus. He had already told Bronly that he wasn’t interested in the
job, and no matter what kind of stories the town parents told him,
he wasn’t going to change his mind.

He didn’t even change his mind when they
offered him nearly double his current salary, plus a house at the
edge of town. He had never been in this business for the money. He
wasn’t about to start now.

No one mentioned the supernatural at all. No
one talked about the event in the kitchen or the strange things
he’d seen just since he got here, and he didn’t blame them.

After talking with MariCate, some of the
interest had left him. The others had been right: this wasn’t
something that a police chief would deal with, even if he did work
up here. The vandalism wasn’t really vandalism, the intruder was
known to everyone.

It was one of those things that people put up
with. Had the intruder been an actual person and not something
magical, everyone would make excuses, telling Retsler about the
kid’s bad home life or his poor upbringing or his limited
intelligence. No one would ask the chief to intervene, especially
since it seemed that no one got hurt.

That was what had cooled him, if “cool” was
the right word. So far as he could tell, these creatures hadn’t
ever killed anyone. In fact, if the story MariCate had told could
be believed, the creatures had saved the life of the children
during that snowstorm, and got them out untraumatized.

All of the stories were relatively
benevolent. There was no evidence that the creatures were what
killed the adults, they might have simply died in a colder part of
the cave, thinking they were safe. The creature that invaded the
kitchen had never harmed a soul, not even when that cook years ago
had let the creature choose ingredients for meals. In fact, the
meals had to be good because the recipes were still in use.

So, aside from the occasional angry outburst,
the kind he’d seen from a variety of humans in a variety of
circumstances, the creature seemed somewhat normal.

If such things could be called normal.

After a few bottles of Blackberry Porter from
Wild River Brewing (something he couldn’t get in Montana and
missed, the summertime microbrews from his home state), Retsler
planned his drive back to Montana. He decided he wouldn’t even go
to Whale Rock. He still didn’t want to see anyone there, still
didn’t want to revisit the place.